The perils of being a Public Relations professional in India.

It is not easy to be a Public Relations professional in India. From being completely misunderstood as a profession to little or no appreciation of its tremendous importance to corporations and organisations,  Public Relations as a professional service has not received its due at all. This is quite unlike advertising and event management which are willy nilly recognized as bona fide professional industries.

In public perception Public Relations is equivalent to the dirty tricks departments of corporations, which somehow tries to pass on laudatory but half baked and often exaggerated information pertaining to their clients to a gullible press.  Nothing could be farther from the truth. PR professionals will not pass on any information that will not make sense, or is likely to be laughed off by a intrinsically and rightly skeptical Indian media.

Far from eating out of the hands of PR professionals as the world and sometimes the clients(who ought to know better) believe, journalists will not pick up even those stories which are obviously news worthy, for the simple reason, that they never have a dearth of news worthy stories. If a competent PR professional does seem to have a way with certain journalists, and is able to get his or herstory published, it most likely has to be the result of them having done their homework in terms of facts and research right, every time. This creates a bond of trust between the journalist and the PR representative. No serious PR practitioner will let anything spoil this symbiotic, but strictly professional relationship.

That is why it is critical that a PR professional choose his or her clients with care. Pedigree and integrity have to be the watchword here. You would put a years' old carefully built up relationship with senior journalists at risk if your clients weren't up to much good and you had to represent them. Of course for you to get those kinds of clients you need to have the commensurate skill set. Excellent communication skills, the ability to understand matters pertaining to business, and the capability of pitching relevant stories to the media.

In a far from perfect world, you will of course  come across clients who are megalomaniacs and patently unreasonable, PR representatives who are totally at sea about what is expected of them, and moronic journalists with the IQs of kindergarten children. As a PR person you need to be able to quickly identify the kind of clients you could develop a working relationship with, and the kind of journalists you can have an equal and mutually satisfying professional relationship with.

But by far the most challenging part of a PR representative's job has to be the safeguarding of their commercial interests. Most clients tend to overlook that positive news coverage is worth its weight in gold, and counts for much more than an exorbitantly priced ad. You pay for an ad and it gets published. There is no intellectualising and pitching involved. Besides most people don't believe what comes in ads. Do you get gratitude or gratefulness for news coverage you helped them get from the client? More of often than not there is quibbling about the size(kitne sq cm hai?), and how their product or service was bound to be covered by the press! Instances of clients not paying, or paying in part abound. That is why insisting on advance payments is always a wise option.